I had a quite productive weekend working on the Poughkeepsie Farm Project site, and learned a lot of useful things about Drupal in the process.

Content Profiles

I now understand why core profiles are going away in Drupal 7, because they really do suck. All the flexibility and features that you get used to with custom content types and views go away when you are working on profiles. This became an issue as we were trying to create a Board of Directors page that was built dynamically from user accounts, and actually wanted to expose a draggable view to let people order lists of users manual (alphabetic sort wasn’t quite what we were looking for). I managed to convert over to content profiles, and life got a lot better. The results are here.

Epublish

This weekend we pushed out the first newsletter in the new format using the epublish module. I’ve been working with Susan (executive director) and Jane (newsletter editor) for the last month to get this right. There is a lot of initial investment here on all sides as I had to make a few code changes to get this to work well for us, and a lot of theming. It’s especially tricky as we’re trying to make an HTML email look basically just like the page people see, even though they go through entirely different templates and theme paths, and html support in email clients is far less intelligent than in browsers.

I also managed to collect and submit my patches upstream, so I feel like a good little open source citizen there.

Recipes

Recipes submission and indexing are now live on the site, using the really well put together recipe module. I had to build a slightly clever hack to list relevant recipes from the produce pages. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get epublish and recipes to play nicely together, because right now they don’t. They both do slightly funny hacking with the body field and what’s in it, which is going to require patching one or both to get the display we want.

Events

The events infrastructure on the site is now using a local calendar instead of just loading from Google Calendar. This lets us have a google calendar compatible feed. As well as having our event links go to content in our site instead of loosing the user on a Google Calendar page. There are still a few kinks to work out here, but overall this is going pretty well.

All of these have been in the works for the bulk of January, and it’s great to get this stuff coming to fruition. Looking forward to how these are received by the membership. Now I’ve just got to make a few front page changes and we’ve got to pull together the volunteer opportunity database, and the main backend work for the 2011 season will be accomplished.